Repeatedly Encountered Descriptions of Wrongdoing Seem More True but Less Unethical: Evidence in a Naturalistic Setting
通过向美国成年人发送企业不当行为新闻标题的纵向实验，发现重复接触同一不当行为描述会使其显得更真实，但道德评价却更宽容，且这种效应在自然情境中持续存在。
When news about moral transgressions goes viral on social media, the same person may repeatedly encounter identical reports about a wrongdoing. In a longitudinal experiment ( N = 607 U.S. adults from Mechanical Turk), we found that these repeated encounters can affect moral judgments. As participants went about their lives, we text-messaged them news headlines describing corporate wrongdoings (e.g., a cosmetics company harming animals). After 15 days, they rated these wrongdoings as less unethical than new wrongdoings. Extending prior laboratory research, these findings reveal that repetition can have a lasting effect on moral judgments in naturalistic settings, that affect plays a key role, and that increasing the number of repetitions generally makes moral judgments more lenient. Repetition also made fictitious descriptions of wrongdoing seem truer, connecting this moral-repetition effect with past work on the illusory-truth effect. The more times we hear about a wrongdoing, the more we may believe it—but the less we may care.